Craig Kapitan
Senior Multimedia Journalist

Craig Kapitan is a Senior Multimedia Journalist for New Zealand's Herald, with extensive experience reporting on crime, navigating courtrooms, and supervising other crime and courts reporters.

I started my newspaper career in 2000 and have spent the majority of my time since then navigating courtrooms in the United States and New Zealand or supervising other crime and courts reporters. Along the way, I’ve covered the trials of a military base mass shooter, gang hitmen, rogue police officers and prison guards and more murder and death penalty cases than I can recall. Non-courtroom assignments have included rushing to a small Texas town where remnants of Nasa’s Columbia space shuttle rained down after its explosion, coverage of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, a one-on-one interview with former US President George Bush Sr and a surreal ride in Chuck Norris' ute during which I quizzed the actor about his favourite Chuck Norris jokes. Some of my proudest moments in journalism include an investigative series that helped result in the criminal conviction of a judge and a 20,000-word, four-part story about a decorated police officer whose life was nearly destroyed by PTSD after serving as a sniper in Iraq. The later series resulted in a 2008 Livingston Award, which dubs itself the Pulitzer Prize for reporters under 35. I tied in the ‘excellence in national reporting’ category with The New York Times’ CIA reporter. I studied journalism at the University of Missouri and worked for newspapers in San Francisco and Texas before moving to Auckland in 2015. I spent six years in the TVNZ newsroom before starting at that Herald in 2021.

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